NIST, FISMA, HIPAA, and the audit cycle. We build systems that meet the controls without slowing development to a crawl.
Health research and clinical organizations operate under control frameworks that are not negotiable. NIST 800-53 rev 5, FISMA Moderate, FedRAMP-aligned controls for federal work, HIPAA for clinical settings. The systems that hold research data have to stay running through the audit cycle, scale as new initiatives launch, and integrate with whatever existed before.
The pattern that breaks programs is when compliance gets bolted on late. Engineering ships fast for a launch deadline, then spends the next two quarters retrofitting controls while velocity collapses. We design the other way around. Identity boundaries, network segmentation, encryption posture, and audit logging are part of the architecture from week one, not an audit-cycle scramble.
Cloud platforms ship for a research milestone, then accumulate compliance debt that surfaces as the next ATO approaches. The fix is rarely a checklist. It is an architecture re-think under deadline pressure.
Legacy systems run the actual science. Maintenance gets slower every quarter, vulnerabilities accumulate, and the few engineers who understand the codebase are stretched thin. Multi-quarter rewrites are not in the budget.
Data crosses boundaries through CSV exports, manual reconciliation, and shadow scripts. Integration sprawl is the quiet tax. Interoperability work that does not break compliance is harder than it sounds.
The system has to keep running through review cycles. Evidence collection, control mapping, and stakeholder coordination compete with feature work. Engineering teams take the hit.
Most engagements in this space anchor on one of the following. Many combine two or three.
NIST 800-53 rev 5 and FISMA Moderate cloud architectures designed in from week one. Identity, network segmentation, and audit posture as architecture, not retrofit.
Learn moreAI-augmented engineering that ships modernized components without taking the production system down. Faster than traditional refactoring, with quality gates intact.
Learn moreAPI design and data flow that connects research and clinical platforms reliably. Integration work that does not break compliance posture or audit evidence.
Learn moreSenior cloud and software engineers with practitioner-level compliance experience. Embedded into your team, ramping fast, contributing inside your existing review and approval flow.
Learn moreA federal health research agency required a secure cloud-based platform to support a large-scale research initiative. We delivered a cloud-native architecture on Google Cloud Platform with secure serverless infrastructure, automated deployment pipelines, and DevSecOps embedded across the lifecycle. The environment met NIST 800-53 rev 5 and FISMA Moderate, scaled reliably, and supported continuous development without disrupting production.
Read the full case studyAging research code was increasingly difficult to maintain and extend. We introduced AI-augmented engineering workflows to accelerate the modernization at a pace traditional refactoring could not match, with human-led oversight on architecture and cutovers. The team caught vulnerabilities earlier and the system never went down.
Read the full case study